The Robot Virtual World team is proud to announce their initial release of the FTC Ring It Up virtual environment, just in time for kickoff! This year’s virtual competition field features two new robots designed specifically for the game. The robots are completely programmable in ROBOTC and even use the same Logitech USB Remote Control as the real world competition, allowing teams to refine their programming skills, practice driving, and form gameplay strategies well in advance of their first matches.

For full information, including download instructions, please visit our blog!

How is the performance of Virtual World this time? I tested it last year and decided not to use it because of performance issues. We will be running on laptops without powerful graphics hardware so the performance must be acceptable in this environment. It is about time for our team to decide on what licenses to get. So I need to decide whether to give Virtual World another try. I don't think I can try it again because my previous trial license has already expired and I want to try it on the same laptop as the one I tried last year.

Mon Sep 10, 2012 1:38 pm

JohnWatson

Site Admin

Joined: Thu May 24, 2012 12:15 pmPosts: 722

Re: FTC Ring It Up! Virtual World now live!

MHTS wrote:

How is the performance of Virtual World this time? I tested it last year and decided not to use it because of performance issues. We will be running on laptops without powerful graphics hardware so the performance must be acceptable in this environment. It is about time for our team to decide on what licenses to get. So I need to decide whether to give Virtual World another try. I don't think I can try it again because my previous trial license has already expired and I want to try it on the same laptop as the one I tried last year.

The minimum recommended specs can be found here: http://www.robotc.net/download/rvw/specifications.php Usually with laptops the program will run, but not very smoothly. If you were having problems last year with the performance it probably hasn't changed to this year.

I have been using the virtual world and have the problem that sometimes the robot and the rings go right through solid objects. After it goes through them sometimes it gets stuck and then the robot can't move. Is this because I'm running the program on a laptop?

Sun Oct 28, 2012 5:11 pm

rcahoon

Site Admin

Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2012 10:34 amPosts: 192

Re: FTC Ring It Up! Virtual World now live!

We make the best effort we can to provide an accurate simulation environment, but in order to maintain good performance the physics calculations we use for the virtual worlds sometimes have to take shortcuts which can lead to unrealistic behavior, such as the solid objects passing through each other. This is something we're continuously working on improving, but it will never be totally perfect.

The best I can recommend is that - since the same program probably wouldn't work in the real world either if it's crashing the robot into things - if the robot gets stuck, modify your program to avoid that situation and reload the level using the circular arrow button on the left side of the in-game screen.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum